Melancholy & Modernism

Tuesday, February 16, 1999

Melancholy & Modernism

ART: Edward Weston captures life in pictures

By Nerissa Pacio

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

A glimpse of Edward Weston’s work might reveal Weston the
naturalist – the American photographer who captured precision and
avoided manipulation in aesthetic close-ups of tangled cypress
roots and jagged rock formations. A second look might reveal Weston
the visual architect, who built images of a single cabbage leaf’s
convoluted, geometric crevices or the female body’s sharp angles
and curved mounds – a body nude, folded over upon itself, and
isolated in a ray of light. Yet another survey of the artist’s
photography may reveal Weston the surrealist who experimented with
clashing objects in disproportionate scenes of the imagination, at
times, marked by a foreboding hollowness.

Through May 3, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will
display Weston’s photographic personalities in 140 vintage prints,
all linked by the quintessential Weston vision. Organized by the
curators of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and drawn from the
collection of artholders, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Lane, "Edward
Weston: Photography and Modernism" exhibits some of Weston’s
best-known works from his anthropomorphic "Pepper" series to his
more rarely displayed prints.

"This particular exhibition shows the full variety of Weston’s
work and shows really how his work is conveyed not just in the
history of 20th-century photography but the history of American
modernism as well," says Graham Beal, director of LACMA.

The depth and breadth of the premiere traveling exhibition makes
this display of Weston’s a first.

"It’s quite fitting that we (are) the first venue for this
Weston exhibition primarily because Weston gave us many firsts,"
says Tim Wride, associate curator of photography at LACMA.

One of those "firsts" include Weston’s accomplishment as the
first winner of the Guggenheim grant.

In "Through Another Lens," an autobiographical account written
by Weston’s wife, Charis Wilson, Wilson recalls the problems she
found in the usual portrayals of her husband and his work:

"It’s not unusual for an artist to suffer this posthumous
distortion; too often the reputation becomes identified with one
part of the work rather than with the whole. In Edward’s case, this
might be close-ups of vegetables or shells, nudes, or Point Lobos
rocks and cypress."

In other cases, Weston’s very public work may well be identified
with his complicated private life involving an affair with
photographer and political activist Tina Modotti who also later
became one of Weston’s photographic subjects. Wride, however,
prefers to view Weston’s purist work for what it is, as opposed to
a reflection of Weston’s private matters.

"I try not to let that kind of People magazine idea of blending
the two together to infringe on the way the work functions," Wride
says. "So I try to avoid that myself. But maybe there is a way that
I probably don’t (avoid) that."

This exhibition goes beyond characterizations of Weston, based
on isolated periods from his professional career or associations
with his personal life. Unlike Weston’s own style of, for example,
zooming in on a single fragment of an object or person, this
traveling exhibit focuses on Weston’s work as an entire body
through a wealth of his photographs spanning the time line of his
life.

The exhibition runs the entire gamut of Weston’s career,
beginning with his pictorial settings to his move to the Armco
(steel) plant in Ohio in 1922, and through his period in Mexico
from 1922 to 1926. The work also continues on into his return to
California when his style began to evolve into abstractions, as in
his 1939 surrealist composition "Rubber Dummy, M.G.M."

"He really developed a new vocabulary – a vocabulary of
modernism," Wride says. While Weston came to be known as the great
California "purist" photographer, the variations between his
period’s works defy this inclination to categorize Weston as a
simple man.

True, Weston’s own son, Cole, who continued the American
photographic legacy of his father, asserted in a 1989 interview
that simplicity was the guiding force of Weston’s work.

"In the days when our society was being cluttered with automatic
washing machines … appliances of every sort … he lived and
worked with the barest necessities, giving his undivided energy and
attention to his work," Cole says. "And not to the occupations of
acquiring the latest manufactured goods in order to keep up with
the Joneses."

But Weston’s aversion to material wealth did not necessarily
translate into simple photographs. From his portraits of public
figures such as Igor Stravinsky and E.E. Cummings, to his sensually
curvaceous, polished or oiled peppers, to his ironically unerotic
nudes, a Weston photograph could not simply fall under the label of
"simple."

"There is a quiet picture he took, and you won’t be able to
reproduce it," Wride says. "It is one of the more Zen-like still
lifes that he did of a single twig on a shoreline supported by a
rock and a second rock half submerged in water that is such a gem,
and amazingly, to my eye, a spiritual composition or construction.
And I have to stop every time I go by it."

ART: "Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism" is on view at
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through May 3. Tickets are $7
for adults and $5 seniors and students with ID. For more
information, call (323) 857-6000. Photos courtesy of the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston

"Pepper," one of Edward Weston’s photos, portrays his unique
look at objects in life.

"Nude," an Edward Weston photo, is on display at LACMA through
May 3.

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